Monitoring systems or how to get lost in fierce madness. There are many solutions to monitor systems and most of them have some kind of web interface to operate. Choosing the right tool for any job is a tedious task and for a newbie like me it is a bit harder, specially for a sensitive […]
Monitoring Systems (One)
How to synchronize system and network time in FreeBSD
For several applications it is necessary to synchronize your server to the network time. The protocol is called Network Time Protocol (NTP) and is basically giving the correct time to the world nowadays. Reading the Wikipedia entry is very interesting. FreeBSD comes with the ntp client. To set this up you will just add the […]
How to install Nextcloud on FreeBSD 12
Nextcloud. Have you heard of it? That’s quite probable if you’re here. But, what is it, what is it? Some say it is a Google Apps replacement, some say it’s just a place to store your documents, some others just rely on it to share documents across the company and edit them just in time […]
The LAMP stack (Debian 9)
LAMP stack stands for a software stack composed by Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (or Perl). It is used for many purposes and its common ground for system administrators. Since there are several of Linux distributions there are some differences in the way the LAMP stack is installed. In this guide we are using the […]
How to manage site visitors based on IP Geolocation
Whenever someone publishes a website on the internet, most of the times, their intention is that site to be seen around the globe. However, as a site administrator you may want to divert users from one country to visit some specific version of that site, maybe because of the visitor’s language. Other times, less often […]
How to harden Apache HTTP
Disclaimer: This is a long article. I haven’t collected some nice configuration settings here for the sake of it. There are other hardening guides but some fall short on explaining the functionalities to be enabled or disabled. Every step is shortly, and hopefully clearly, explained so any reader can grasp the main idea of every […]
How to set Apache’s MPM Event and PHP-FPM on FreeBSD
As explained in another article the default Apache’s configuration at compile time sets its multi-processing module (MPM for short) to the pre-fork configuration setting. This is not the best performant configuration for Apache. Out of the box Apache comes compiled in its safest form, from the processing mode perspective since the pre-fork setting will open […]
How to enable log rotation on FreeBSD
This is a very short simple entry but it may help you. As many others you may be running a web server, or any other service that creates some logging information. Enable log rotation on FreeBSD will keep those log files in a manageable size (at least more readable) and they won’t grow and expand […]
How to mitigate DoS attacks with mod_evasive on FreeBSD
Denial of Service attacks or the distributed version of them (DDoS) have been growing throughout the years with their ups and downs. In my view the only thing that will happen to them is even bigger growth. With the advent of IoT devices the next decade will see an increase in these kind of attacks. […]
How to find vulnerabilities in your WordPress with WPScan
Vulnerability scanners are useful tools for administrators and security analysts alike. For the casual WordPress user tools like WPScan may look excessive and complicated for their knowledge, they just need their blog, web page, whatever they’re doing up and running. Any complex administration bothers them to the max, and there are good and valid reasons […]